Find My Champ

What do you think of when you hear the word “Champ”? Someone who is the best? A sports champion? How about someone who fights for a cause? Here at Microsoft we have employees called “Developer Evangelists”. Part of their job is to help get the word out about Microsoft products and technologies. The other part of their job is to champion our developers.

Here in Windows Phone we call our evangelists “Phone Champs”. Champs ensure our developers get exactly the help & support they need and are the voice of the developer community. They are all experts on our platform and serve as local resources to answer questions from current or prospective developers. Champs can help you troubleshoot a problem in your app and can help you get your hands on a phone for testing. Oh, and some of our Champs are really funny and can tell you a good joke or two.

So how do you find one of our great Phone Champs? Today I’m happy to announce a new application to help you find them. We originally wanted to call the app “Champ Acquisition and Discovery 1.0 for Workgroups Windows Phone Edition.” Luckily cooler heads prevailed and we’re calling it “Find My Champ”.

As you can see above, there are two main pivots: all & local. The first picture shows the “local” pivot, as someone in Paris would see it. We see that there are three Phone Champs within 250km of the phone’s current location.

Next we see what happens when the phone is rotated. A map comes up and shows all the Phone Champs as pushpins. Tapping a Phone Champ’s pushpin (or on their name in the list in the first image) reveals the contact info that a Phone Champ has chosen to share:

Get the App

Go download the app’s source code. Compile the code in our dev tools and side-load Find My Champ onto your developer device or into the emulator. The app will also be in the Marketplace soon for you to download. Find your local Phone Champ and get in touch with them. Ask them for help with your app or to let you know about events or hackathons in your area.

We’d love to get your feedback on the Find My Champ application. Tell us what we can do to make it more useful. You can also come help us improve the app on Codeplex. Additionally, I suspect that many of you will have creative ideas for how to use the Champs OData feed in other applications, mashups, etc. Please let me know what you create!